Make Money for your Favorite Charity while Setting Trends among your Friends

There’s a bit of trendsetter-wannabe in all of us – or at least rec.fm is hoping there is. Using their service, you can become the go-to guy on all things tech amongst your friends, or the go-to gal for the latest and greatest novels to hit the shelf. But it doesn’t end there: rec.fm is ultimately a site that pairs product recommendations with charity, in an attempt to give a little social oomph to raising money for a good cause.

Rec.fm is simple. You can make a product recommendation right from their front page using the tried and true 140-character description popularized by Twitter. Then you can post it to Facebook or Twitter, and watch your friends flock to get their hands on your new favorite digital camera (or hope that at least one friend takes some interest).

And if a friend does make that purchase, that’s where the charitable donation comes in. At no cost to yourself or your friend, Rec.fm will donate a percentage of that sale to the charity of your choice. They run on affiliate fees, meaning that just by using their service they’ll earn enough to stay in business and donate the remainder to your charity.

Rec.fm does a good job of preempting the potential spammy mess that this could cause. In order to narrow down the offerings to only legitimate recommendations, they have a system in place that requires the community to vote on each recommendation, rating them either “bad”, “good” or “great”. The bad ones get weeded from the site, while the good and great ones actually earn money for charity.

The recommenders with the most “great” ratings also get a little bonus: they get featured on Rec.fm’s main page, and they are ranked on a leaderboard of Rec.fm heroes. This way, a community of respected recommenders is built up, and users can go to the top ten or twenty for trusted product reviews.

If you want to be known on your social network for your trendsetting ways while earning a bit of money for charity, you can post your first recommendation in about 30 seconds over at Rec.fm. It’s fast, easy, and fun – nothing to sneeze at, especially when it’s tied to charity.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.